Lessig Revises Book With Public Wiki

Silent_E writes "Always wanted to see your words in print? The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Lawrence Lessig is revising his book 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace' using a wiki-based, public discussion. The proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated. . All royalties are going to Creative Commons, plus the advance. "

Comments

Collaborative book writing

[caluml]

I've always thought that writing a book collaboratively is an interesting idea. It's just an extension of the childhood game where you write a word on a piece of paper, fold it over, and pass it along.
However, I always thought about a fictional book.

Re:Collaborative book writing

[kebes]

In practice I agree with you. However, that is because most collaborative books are self-contained chapters that some editor casually reads over and then glues together. The editor is, in fact, *not allowed* to make sweeping changes to the style of a particular chapter, since the author in question would legitimately get angry. Each author is given his own "right" to describe things as he sees fit.

In a wiki project, the final editor can pick the version of each wiki article he likes best, and he can mercilessly modify and change the style so that it sounds good. If anyone doesn't like it, they can of course fork the book based on the version they liked better.

The point is that the wiki style, by getting rid of this "ownership of the author" has the potential to make collaborative projects actually be better.

In practice, of course, this requires quite a good editor... so we'll see how well it turns out.

Hieraki

[Tobias Luetke]

Hieraki is a project which aims to create a wiki with pages hierarchically arranged instead of interlinked like on a traditional wiki. It uses the notion of Books, Chapters and Pages.

Its the main means of documentation for the rubyonrails project and is used for writing documentation at several hosting services like textdrive and universities.

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

Re:Questionable

[KhaZ]

I agree with you somewhat, but in true Slashdot fashion, none of us monkeys can agree with each other completely... What fun would that be? One comment max, on every post!

Anyhow, ideally a wiki should have every contributor be both contributing AND editting.

But in theory, nobody will, they'll just throw their points together like the Portland Pattern Repository (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki) and have everything looking like crap.

Sigh, too bad. Although I'd love to be proved wrong!

JotSpot is proprietary

[Eloquence]

Given that Larry Lessig is on the board of the Free Software Foundation, it is a bit strange that he uses a wiki engine which is proprietary, even though free (and, in many ways, superior) alternatives such as MediaWiki (the engine used by Wikipedia) are readily available.

Wikis are the next step in internet (r)evolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is often viewed as a great information source (especially since finding informations got easier via *working* search engines).

But it could be even FAR better, more correct, more complete, better interlinked, if publishing was easier, more collaborative and on a higher level than html.

This is exactly what a public wiki does so easily.
The main problem currently is, that about 95% of the web users still don't know wiki at all - it could make so much things so much more productive!

It is a building block of free information and free collaboration.